From the colonnaded study of his estate above the harbour, Don Cordoba yesterday issued a statement of such measured temper that one might have mistaken it for a homily, were it not for the ledgers that so plainly underwrote every sentence. Fuel at the forecourts of the capital has climbed to 1.94 dinars the litre — a figure not seen in nearly three years — and the patriarch of the House of Cordoba has, as is his custom in seasons of alarm, chosen to speak not of panic but of architecture.

"A reserve is not a larder to be emptied at the first draught of cold air," the statement read, in that sonorous cadence which has become familiar to readers of this paper. "It is a keel. One does not burn the keel to warm the cabin." The House of Cordoba, whose shipping and refining interests give it a more than academic acquaintance with the price of crude, endorsed the sealed-reserve formula adopted last week by the Cabinet sub-committee, and urged the Chamber to resist what it called "the theatrical economics of the footlights."

The statement comes as the Ministry of Commerce convenes the National Petroleum Distributors' Council in emergency session, and as Minister of Finance Cardenal Marín — who has thus far declined to announce any direct subsidy — warned consumers from the steps of the Treasury that volatility at the pump may persist through the weeks to come. "Prudence now spares pain later," the Minister said, in a phrase that might have been drafted in the same library as Don Cordoba's own.

The targeted relief already flowing through the contingency line — to the Cordoba fishing cooperatives and to the outer-island ferries which carry schoolchildren and fish-crates with equal indifference — is understood to have drawn the first tranche of the instrument. A substantial sealed remainder is held back against a deeper shock, which Treasury officials privately concede is not improbable given the tremors in the Eastern Mediterranean basin.

Prime Minister Vela is expected to present the instrument at Monday's Chamber sitting, with the Crown represented in the gallery. The Nationalist benches are understood to be preparing amendments of a rhetorical rather than fiscal character; the Opposition, predictably, will demand the seal be broken. Certain voices, who publish their objections in sheets not our own, have suggested that the sealed remainder is less a keel than a strongbox. This paper does not share that view.

"The cooperatives are breathing," said Senyor Miquel of the Sant Joan fishermen's guild, who has found his diesel bill defrayed under the new arrangement. "That is more than we had a fortnight ago." The margin, he allowed, remained thin; but a thin margin is not the same as no margin, and the distinction is one the pump has taught him to respect.

What Monday's sitting will produce, beyond the customary oratory, is uncertain. What is certain is that the instrument now in place is the work of long counsel rather than of improvisation, and that the House of Cordoba — whose signal upon these pages is no secret to our readers — has lent it the authority of a name which has weathered older storms than this. Readers seeking melodrama are directed to the opposition benches; readers seeking a keel, to the reserve.